Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Mladen Dollar, A Voice and Nothing More

Dolar attempts
to take our focus away from the observable and empirical voice by reminding us
that there is always a negative: that which is not said, not meant, the object
voice that point to the other.

“Yet it never
appears as such, it always functions as the negative of the voice, its shadow,
its reverse, and thus something which can evoke the voice in its pure form”
(152).

This passage
occurs in the second final chapter of the book (chapter 6: Freud’s Voice) where
Dolar turns from the individual threads that had been the focus of the first
five chapters back to the questions that deal with the whole cloth, the voice. In
fact, Dolar introduces his investigation of the object voice with a series: an
epigraph, a joke, and an anecdote. In the rush to dig in to the treatment of
the subject, the worst mistake we could make as readers would be to rush past
these openings, to dismiss them as mere stylistic decoration. Therefore one
could safely say that the significance of the questions and answers that Dolar
works through are contained within the series of overtures which function as
threads combined to make a piece of cloth. While the threads of Dolar's inquiry
are all present in this series, set forth in a manner that preserves their
complex inter-relationships, reading them requires that we first pulled them
from the cloth and held them up for inspection, we should then reconsider them
in terms of their role to hold the cloth together. As such, my goal in this reading is to repeat the pulling of
the threads that Dolar implicitly seems to suggest. I literally perform the act
of pulling a thread by separating the sentence from its main clause -“Silence seems to
be something extremely simple, where there is nothing to understand or
interpret”- to highlights the striking repetition of the predicate nominative
pronoun “it” and its possessive form. I will try to demonstrate that there is
no such thing as silence in Dolar’s text; the only thing exist is voice
presented in different forms.

The subject
of the main clause is “silence,” its replacement by the predicate nominative,
“it,” freezes its function as the grammatical subject of the sentence and turns
the latter into another undetermined but speaking subject that could be read as
“silence’s” other voice. Though the speaking subject of the sentence is
unspecified, the repetition of “it” creates a sounding that makes the
determined subject of the main clause (silence) function and resonate
differently, almost as a voice. The juxtaposition of the two sentences-“Silence seems to be something extremely simple, where there is nothing to
understand or interpret. Yet it never appears as such, it always functions as
the negative of the voice, its shadow, its reverse, and thus something which
can evoke the voice in its pure form”- effaces the function of the grammatical
subject as the subject of enunciation (sujet enonciateur). As such, the
predicate nominative “it” operates as the voice of the other that imposes
itself upon the subject of enunciation (silence).
Beneath the enunciation of silence as the grammatical subject of the
sentence lies the assumption that it is the speaking subject that voices out
what the sentence holds from us. One may wonder about the effect of the
absence of a vocal voice in the sentence, it may be that in the silence of
presence of the voice, one is left with a subject (silence) and its other (it)
whose tie clashes.

In the sentence, the
resonance of silence rehabilitates and pursues its aestheticization. I want to
pose this aestheticization of the silence against Dolar’s psychoanalysis of the
voice. If the danger of aestheticization is the attribution to the aestheticized
object of “a meaning beyond any ordinary meanings,” then the process of aestheticization is a suspension
apart from meaning. As such, the “aesthetics of voice” is the chapter missing from
Dolar’s book, because he dismisses its possibilities too quickly.

I would like to add that I
am thinking about blogging as adding a different level to the aesthetic implications
of silence in locating the place of the voice. If the voice itself already can
be considered as an always in between the medium of silence, the blogging –
virtual online speaking – increases the instance of in betweeness. Similar to
most of the abilities of modern and mostly digital devices it allows a remark,
opinion to come in at a instantaneous and spontaneous level, which so far
related most of the time only to a real-time remark, a heard voice. At the same
time blog posts and comments connect to the written comment, which
traditionally are considered as the captured voice of writing. Finally I would
like to make here a connection between the blogging voice and the captured, disembodied
voice of the analysand in psychoanalysis. Both bear marks of spontaneity which
is much harder to constitute for publication of thoughts which went through the
process of self-verification before being expressed.

1 comment:

The aim you assert at the outset--"I will try to demonstrate that there is no such thing as silence in Dolar’s text; the only thing exist is voice presented in different forms."--is worthy but there are many obstacles that impede you pulling this claim off.

First, lots of terminological errors. By "the main clause" do you mean the topic sentence of the paragraph? Because your reading is actually dealing with two sentences, only one of which is listed in the header of your reading register. The "predicate nominative" is not "it"--that's just a pronoun standing in in the subject position. (Predicate nominatives happen only in sentences with the verb "to be" as the active verb).

Second, I'm not clear about where you're heading with the introduction of the subject of enunciation. How is it that the juxtaposition "effaces the function of the grammatical subject as the subject of enunciation"? Wouldn't the sentence have to be in the first person for these subjects to be engaged? How can the "it" serve as "he voice of the other that imposes itself upon the subject of enunciation"? Given the terminological errors already pointed out, I'm wondering whether this too is a terminological error? (Subject of enonciation from Benveniste or Lacan, for instance?)

Finally you claim that "the resonance of silence rehabilitates and pursues its aestheticization" but i don't know what you mean by aestheticization of silence here. Where are the features of aesthetics in these sentences?

I like your turn at the end towards speculating about blogging and the nature of voice there. How would Dolar have expanded that, do you think?